“You had better knock on the door, Fobbing,” Serena said, holding out her hand for his bridle.

He gave it to her, but before he had reached the front door, it opened, and Mr Goring stepped out. He came up to the mare, and, looking gravely into the beautiful face above him, said: “Lady Serena, Mrs Floore desires me to ask you if you will be so good as to come into the house for a moment.”

Her brows rose swiftly. “I will do so, certainly. Is anything amiss?”

“I am afraid—very much amiss,” he replied, in a heavy tone. He held up his hand. “May I assist you to—”

“No, I thank you.” One deft, practised movement, and her voluminous skirt was clear of the pommels. The next instant she was on the ground, and giving her bridle into Fobbing’s hand. She caught up her skirt, swinging it over her arm, and went with Mr Goring into the house. “Is Emily ill?” she asked.

“No, not ill. It will be better, I daresay, if you learn from Mrs Floore what has occurred. I myself arrived here only a short time ago, and—But I will take you up to Mrs Floore! I should warn you that you will find her in considerable distress, Lady Serena.”

“Good God, what can have happened?” she exclaimed, hurrying towards the stairs, her whip still in her hand.

He followed close on her booted heels, and on the first floor slid in front of her, to open the door into the drawing-room. Serena went in, with her free stride, but checked in astonished dismay at the spectacle that met her eyes. The redoubtable Mrs Floore, still attired in her dressing-gown, was lying back in a deep wing-chair, her housekeeper holding burnt feathers to her nose, and her maid kneeling before her and chafing her hands.

“My dear ma’am—! For heaven’s sake, what dreadful accident has befallen?” Serena demanded.

The housekeeper, shedding tears, sobbed: “It’s her poor heart, my lady! The shock gave her such palpitations as was like to have carried her off! Years ago, the doctor told me she should take care, and now see what’s come of it! Oh, my lady, what a serpent’s tooth she has nourished in her bosom!”

The maid, much moved, began to sob in sympathy. Mrs Floore, whose usually rubicund countenance Serena saw to have assumed an alarmingly grey tinge, opened her eyes, and said faintly: “Oh, my dear! What shall I do? Why didn’t she tell me? Oh, what a silly, blind fool I have been! I thought—What am I to do?”

Serena, casting her whip on to the table, and stripping off her elegant gauntlets, said, in her authoritative way: “You shall remain perfectly quiet, dear ma’am, until you are a little restored. Get up off the floor, woman, and fetch some hartshorn, or a cordial, to your mistress immediately! And take those feathers away, you idiot! Mr Goring, be so good as to help me move her on to the sofa!”

He was very willing, but a little doubtful, and said in a low voice: “I had better call up the butler: she is too heavy for you, ma’am!”

Serena, who had quickly arranged some cushions at the head of the sofa, merely replied briefly: “Take her shoulders, and do not talk nonsense!”

Once disposed at full length on the sofa, Mrs Floore moaned, but soon began to look less grey. She tried to speak, but Serena hushed her, saying: “Presently, ma’am!” When the maid came back, bearing a glass containing a dose of some cordial in her trembling hand, Serena took it from her, and, raising the sufferer’s head, obliged her to swallow it. In a very short space of time the colour began to come back into Mrs Floore’s cheeks, and her breathing became more regular. The housekeeper, bereft of her evil-smelling feathers, waved a vinaigrette about under her nose, and her maid, still much affected, fanned her with a copy of the Morning Post.

Serena moved away to the window, where Mr Goring was standing. “The less she tries to talk the better it will be for her,”she said, in an undertone. “Now, tell me, if you please, what has happened to overset her like this?”

“Emily—Miss Laleham, I should say—has left the house,” he responded, still in that heavy tone. He saw that she was staring at him with knit brows, and added: “She has run away, ma’am. Leaving behind her a letter for her grandmother.”

“Good heavens! Where is it?”

“Give it to her, Ned!” commanded Mrs Floore, struggling to sit up. “Drat you, Stoke, don’t keep pushing me back! Give me those smelling-salts, and go away, do! I don’t need you any more, nor you neither, Betsey, crying all over me! No, don’t you go, Ned! If there’s anything to be done, there’s no one else to do it for me, for I can’t go careering all over the country—not that it would do a mite of good if I could, for who’s to say where she’s gone to? Oh, Emma, why ever didn’t you tell your grandma?”

Mr Goring had picked up a sheet of paper from the table, and had in silence handed it to Serena.

Dearest Grandmama, it began, in Emma’s unformed writing, “I am so very sorry and I do not like to grieve you but I cannot bear it and I cannot marry Lord R. in spite of coronets, because he frightens me, and I did not tell you but he has written me a dreadful letter and is coming here and he and Mama will make me do just what they want, and indeed I cannot bear it, though I hate excessively to leave you without saying goodbye. Pray do not be angry with me, my dear, dearest Grandmama. Your loving Emma. PS. Pray, pray do not tell Mama or Lord R. where I have gone.

“You would certainly be in a puzzle to do so!” said Serena, reaching the postscript. “Of all the bird-witted little idiots—! My dear ma’am, I beg your pardon, but she deserves to be slapped for such folly! What the devil does she mean by writing such stuff? Rotherham write her a “dreadful letter”? What nonsense! If he has grown impatient, it is not to be wondered at, but to write of him as though he were an ogre is quite abominable!”

“But she is afraid of him, Lady Serena,” said Mr Goring.

“I ought to have known it was Sukey’s doing!” said Mrs Floore, in an agony of remorse. “Right at the start, didn’t I suspect it? Only then Emma wrote me such a letter, so happy it seemed to me, that I thought—Poor little lamb, if I’d only had the sense to tell her what I think of Sukey, which I never did, not thinking it seemly, she wouldn’t have been afraid to tell me! And now there’s Sukey coming here this very day, and how to face her I don’t know, for there’s no denying I haven’t taken proper care of Emma. Not that I care a fig for Sukey, and so I shall tell her! And as for this precious Marquis, let him dare show his face here! Let him dare, that’s all I ask! Scaring the dear little soul out of her senses, which nobody can tell me he hasn’t done, because I know better! And last night—Oh, Ned, I thought she was moped because she didn’t want Sukey to take her away from me, and all I did was to tell her to think about her bride-clothes, so I daresay she took it into her head I was as set on this nasty marriage as her ma! And now what am I to do? When I think of my little Emma, running off all alone, to hide herself heaven knows where—”

“You may be certain of one thing at least, ma’am!” interrupted Serena. “She has not run away alone!”

Mr Goring directed a steady look at her. “Is there an attachment between her and young Monksleigh, ma’am?”

She shrugged. “On her side, I should very much doubt it; on his, evidently! I shall be sorry for him if it ever comes to Rotherham’s ears that he persuaded Emily into this escapade! It is the most disgraceful thing to have done, and if he comes off with a whole skin he may think himself fortunate! Mrs Floore, pray don’t cry! The matter is not past mending, I assure you. I collect that Gerard came to Bath to see Emily, not to stay with friends: has he been to this house? Had you no suspicion of what was in the wind?”

“No, my dear, because Emma said he was the Marquis’s ward, which made it seem right to me, and besides which I thought he was such a twiddle-poop there wasn’t the least harm in letting him go with us to the Gala night, which I did.”

Serena smiled, but said: “Depend upon it, this dramatic flight was his notion, not Emily’s, ma’am! What is more, I would wager my pearls all this nonsense about Rotherham was put into her silly head by him! But let us not waste time in discussing that! What we have to do is to get her back. Mr Goring, I shall need your help!”

“I shall be happy to do everything in my power. Lady Serena, to restore Miss Laleham to Mrs Floore, but I will have no hand in forcing her into marriage with a man whom she fears,” he replied bluntly.

“Let me see anyone dare!” said Mrs Floore. “Only fetch her back to me, and trust me to send this Marquis to the rightabout, and Sukey too!”

There is no question of forcing her to marry Rotherham,”said Serena. “When she meets him again, I fancy she will discover that the extremely unamiable portrait she has painted of him is wide of the mark. Is it known when she left the house?”

“No, because no one saw her go, only she wasn’t gone before ten o’clock, that Betsey swears to, for she heard her moving about in her bedroom when she passed the door. And she ate a bite of bread and butter, and drank a cup of coffee, before she went, and Stoke says the tray was taken up to her at a quarter to ten, just as usual. For I don’t get up to breakfast myself, so Emma has hers in bed too.”

“Come, this is much better!” said Serena. “I feared she might have left overnight, in which case we should have had something to do indeed. Mr Goring, have you met Gerard Monksleigh?”

“I met him at the theatre last night, ma’am.”

“Then you will be able to describe him,” said Serena briskly. “We may be sure of this: they are not lurking in Bath! I do Gerard the justice to think that he means to marry Emily—though how he imagines he may do so, when each of them is under age, is more than I can tell! It would be in keeping with all the rest if he is bearing her off to Gretna Green, but where he found the money for such a journey is again more than I can tell! He may, of course, be taking her to London, with some hopeful notion of procuring a special license there.”

“Oh, my dear, supposing he has it in his pocket already?” exclaimed Mrs Floore. “Supposing he went to Wells, or Bristol, and has married her? Oh, I don’t want her to go throwing herself away on that young fellow!”

“Don’t distress yourself, ma’am! He would find it difficult to induce anyone to believe he is of age.”

“Lady Serena is right, ma’am,” interpolated Mr Goring. “He would be required to bring proof of his age, for he looks a stripling. What do you wish me to do, Lady Serena?”

“To visit the posting-houses here, of course. I imagine you must know them well. Discover if Gerard hired a chaise, and where it was to take him. Did you ride here from Bristol? Is your horse in Bath?”

“I drove here, ma’am, in my curricle. If I should be able to discover the road they took, I can have the horses put to in a trice,” he replied. “I’ll set out immediately.”

“Ned Goring, I’ll go all the way to Land’s End for Emma, but I’ll do it decently!” declared Mrs Floore. “Don’t you think to hoist me into any nasty, open carriage! A chaise-and-four, that’s what you’ll hire!”

“My dear ma’am, you are going to remain quietly here,” said Serena. “It would be quite unfit for you to be rocked and jolted for heaven knows how many hours! Moreover, if this exploit is to be kept secret, it is most necessary that you should be here. If Rotherham is indeed on his way to Bath, he will have to be fobbed off, you know. Whatever be the issue between him and Emily, you cannot wish him to know how scandalously she is behaving—or Lady Laleham either, for that matter! You must tell them both that Emily has gone with a party on an expedition of pleasure. And as for your curricle, Mr Goring, leave it where it is! We shall catch our runaways very much more speedily if we ride, and we shan’t advertise to every pike-keeper, and every chance traveller, that we are racing in pursuit of someone. That is a thing we should do our best to avoid.”

He stared at her. “You do not mean to go, ma’am!”

“Of course I mean to go!” she replied impatiently. “How in the world do you think you could manage without me? You are quite unrelated to Emily; you cannot compel her to return with you! All that would happen, I dare swear, is that you and Gerard would be fighting it out, with the post-boys as seconds, and then there would be the devil to pay!”

He was too much surprised to hear such an expression on her lips to smile at the absurdity of the picture she conjured up. “But you will not ride,ma’am? You cannot have considered! They must be many miles ahead of us already! It would not do for you: you would be fatigued to death!”